REALIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES: BION’S PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DOGEN’S ZEN

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - The author discusses similarities, differences and identities between the later work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and the Soto Zen Buddhist teacher...     

SHUTTING DRETSKE’S DOOR

Dretske proposes a theory of knowledge in terms of a theory of information, but wishes to deny that empirical knowledge settles the large question of scepticism. This leads him to deny the closure of knowledge under known entailment. In a recent paper J?ger argues that Dretske’s theory of information entails closure for knowledge, ‘at least for the kind of propositions here at issue’ (J?ger 2004:194). If J?ger is right, Dretske is seriously embarrassed and must give something up. In this paper I show that there are two flaws in J?ger’s argument. The principle of informational closure considered by J?ger is incompatible with Dretske’s theory of information, and J?ger’s argument that Dretske is committed to a certain kind of substitution instance of that principle of informational closure is invalid. I propose adequacy conditions on signalled information and use them to motivate a formulation of a general closure principle for signalled information. I show that Dretske’s account of information satisfies the adequacy conditions, but in a way which commits him to an instance of the general closure principle. I argue that Dretske is consequently committed to closure for some cases of knowledge for which he wishes to deny closure. Finally, I sketch how, on the basis of the closure principle to which Dretske is committed, J?ger’s broader argument may yet go through.     

MODERN ORTHODOXY’S ANCIENT PAST

The movement known as Modern Orthodox Judaism is often distinguished from “ultra-Orthodoxy” (or Haredi Judaism) in terms of openness. While adherents of the latter form of Judaism typically live together in isolated communities and seek to seal themselves off from secular books and learning (and, in our own age, such potentially malign influences as television, movies, and the internet), Modern Orthodox Jews are generally characterized by a more open attitude toward such things, and toward outsiders and outside ideas in general. The present article seeks to argue that the tendencies represented by these two movements are in fact dyed in the wool—that, from the very beginning, Judaism has endorsed and incorporated both isolationism and openness. This contention is illustrated with examples from the Hebrew Bible itself as well as from the extensive literature of the Second Temple period.     

Popper’S Evolutionary Epistemology Revamped

In a paper entitled “Revolution in Permanence”, published in the collection “Karl Popper: Philosophy and Problems”, John Worrall (1995) severely criticised several aspects of Karl Popper’s work before commenting that “I have no doubt that, given suffi-cient motivation, a case could be constructed on the basis of such remarks that Popper had a more sophisticated version of theory production......” (p. 102). Part of Worrall’s criticism is directed at a “strawpopper”: in his “Darwinian Model” emphasising the similarities and differences between genetic mutation, variation in animal behaviour and the gestation of scientific theories, Popper (1975, 1981, 1994) never stated that tentative scientific conjec-tures “while more or less random, are not completely blind.” He was referring to variation in animal species behaviour, and about tentative scientific conjectures he said nothing, although common sense would indicate that presumably he regarded them as being less blind and less random. In Popper (1977, 1983), giving a summary of his “Darwinian Model”, he repaired this omission about tentative scientific conjectures by inserting the sentence “On a level of World 3 theory formation they are of the character of planned gropings into the unknown.” Recent developments in the field of genetics (see for example Raff (1996), Lewis (1999), Korn (2002)) indicate that Popper’s intuitions were along the modern lines while Worrall’s intuitions are old fashioned. Therefore Popper’s “Darwinian Model” remains both viable and fruitful.     

“TANCRED’S WOUND”:

A recent debate over trauma theory in Holocaust studies has implications for writing by the “generation after.” This article looks at Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996) and the 1998 movie Left Luggage (based on a novel by Carl Friedman), as well as David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1985), as examples of how traumatic knowledge is accessed through literary narratives and the imagination, rather than the historical events. In particular, the trope of “autism” serves to symbolize the difficulty of communicating repressed traumatic memory, while images of containment symbolize the unspeakable contents of the psychic envelope.     

Peter Singer’S Argument for Utilitarianism

The paper begins by situating Singer within the British meta-ethical tradition. It sets out the main steps in his argument for utilitarianism as the ‘default setting’ of ethical thought. It argues that Singer’s argument depends on a hierarchy of reasons, such that the ethical viewpoint is understood to be an adaptation – an extension – of a fundamental self-interest. It concludes that the argument fails because it is impossible to get from this starting-point in self-interest to his conception of the ethical point of view. The fundamental problem is its mixing the immiscible: the Humean subordination of reason to interest with the Kantian conception of reason as universal and authoritative.     

EICHMANN’S BLOOD‐BARTER IN HUNGARY

In 1944, with the Second World War all but lost for Germany and her bombed‐out industry unable to supply the military, one desperate measure taken to obtain needed war material was an offer by Eichmann to barter the lives of one million Jews for ten thousand trucks. The interaction between the SS and Jewish leaders in Budapest—and in turn their appeals outside Hungary—is the subject of five plays: one originating in Austria, two in Germany, one in Great Britain and one in Israel. All five are discussed here in terms of their approach to the subject, their raisons d’être and their pursuit of the ethical issues raised by Jewish involvement with the Nazis. Whether under a fictional or his real name, a central character in these plays is Reszö Kastner (1906–1957), who was accused after the war of cooperation with the Nazis.     

GERSHOM SCHOLEM’S DIALECTIC OF JEWISH HISTORY

Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856–1941) evolved from a political liberal, committed to free competition, hard money and honest government, to become in his maturity a social liberal chiefly pursuing social justice and free speech. In the Supreme Court (1916–1939) he remained faithful to his liberal and progressive parameters. Since about 1905 he evolved from being a half-assimilated Jew to an identified Jew and a Zionist. His original concept of Zionism was as a mission to achieve higher social goals. However, from about the mid-1920s he intensified his Zionism as a vital goal in itself. His synthesis of Progressivism and Zionism gradually came to be the classic tradition of all major American Zionist and pro-Israel trends.     

PHILOSOPHY AS ART IN ARISTOTLE’S PROTREPTICUS

Observing certain affinities with Plato’s Alcibiades, this paper argues that a distinction between care (epimeleia) of the soul and philosophy as its art (technê) is reflected in Aristotle’s Protrepticus. On the basis of this distinction, it claims that two notions of philosophy can be distinguished in the Protrepticus: philosophy as epistêmê and philosophy as technê. The former has the function of contemplating the truth of nature, and Aristotle praises it as the natural telos of human beings; whereas philosophy as technê helps nature to accomplish the end it designed for human beings. It emerges that according to Aristotle in the Protrepticus philosophy is the art of making oneself coincide with one’s nature as a human being.     

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the light of Kant’s Third <Emphasis Type="Italic">Critique</Emphasis> and Schelling’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Real</Emphasis>-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Idealismus</Emphasis>

In this paper I offer a selective, systematic rather than historical account of Merleau-Ponty’s highly complex relation to classical German philosophy, focussing on issues which bear on the question of his relation to transcendentalism and naturalism. I argue that the concerns which define his project in Phenomenology of Perception are fundamentally those of transcendental philosophy, and that Merleau-Ponty’s disagreements with Kant, and the position he arrives at in The Visible and the Invisible, are helpfully viewed in light of (1) issues which Merleau-Ponty identifies as raised by Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, and (2) Schelling’s conversion of Kantian idealism into a Real-Idealismus. Finally I address the question of whether, and on what basis, Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have surpassed systematic philosophy can be defended.     

Population norms of top sensory magnitudes and S. S. Stevens’ exponents

If S. S. Stevens’ exponents indicate the rates at which sensations grow with increases in sensory intensity, they ought to correlate with the population norms of top sensory magnitudes. Using a comprehensive sample of eight sensory dimensions, the tau coefficient of rank correlation between Stevens’ exponents and the medians of the top sensory magnitudes reported by 305 observers was found to be only +.15 (p>05). With the geometric means tau fell to ?.04. A split-half consistency check on the medians of the population norms suggested that they were not to blame for the low correlation. Direct comparisons of pairs of sensory dimensions on 146 additional observers produced results which confirmed the population norms. Since there is no way of comparing most of the top physical stimuli experienced in everyday life, it is not possible to make a joint prediction from exponents and top stimuli. S. S. Stevens’ exponents thus appear to have little predictive value outside the experimental conditions under which they were measured.     

DECODING FERENCZI’S CLINICAL DIARY: BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

In the Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, certain codes and abbreviations are used to refer to the eight patients Ferenczi was treating in 1932. The identities of two patients are known to us. Notably, Dm. (Clara Thompson), and R.N. (Elizabeth Severn), but the others have remained a mystery. This paper uncovers the identities of the other patients in the Diary, and, for the first time, reveals their identities and life stories. Biographical notes on these patients are provided to expand and contextualize our understanding of their lives—Who were they? What kind of families did they come from? And what happened to them after their analyses? The process of uncovering their identities and the ethics of writing about historical patients will also be addressed.     

In Communion with God’s Sparrow: Incorporating Animal Agency into the Environmental Vision of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Laudato Sí</Emphasis>

Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis’s 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God’s love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatures as mere objects to be controlled and used, Pope Francis urges our enactment of a ‘universal communion’ governed by love. I suggest, however, that Laudato Sí’s animal ethic, as focused on ordering human and animal need, is inadequate to its overarching vision of cross-species communion. This vision requires the sort of cross-species relational bridge implicit in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of agency as an irreducibly ‘animate’ expression of choice and afforded further definition in Kenneth J. Shapiro’s conception of a ‘kinesthetic empathy.’ As the phenomenological epistemology underlying both discourses makes possible a rough correspondence, I put these in conversation to demonstrate that a Merleau-Pontyan and reciprocal agency is a constitutive aspect of the fullest sort of cross-species relation, such that recognition of this agency can both deepen our understanding of ‘universal communion’ and foster engagement in its practice.     

‘Nature’ and ‘Elementary Nature’ in Phenomenology and Sāṅkhya

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - This is a comparative study. It is in two parts: ‘nature’ and ‘elementary nature’. ‘Nature (of things)’ as...     

Mel Gibson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Passion</Emphasis> and the Many Uses of Christ’s Suffering

Many Christians resonated with Mel Gibsons film, The Passion of the Christ. The films sympathetic portrayal of Pontius Pilate reinforces the sense of victimization Americans have experienced since 9/11, however, and obscures the real meaning of Christs suffering.Marian Ronan is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Theology and Religion at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, a member seminary of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.     

Cronbach’s α, Revelle’s β, and Mcdonald’s ω<Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis></Subscript>: their relations with each other and two alternative conceptualizations of reliability

We make theoretical comparisons among five coefficients—Cronbach’s α, Revelle’s β, McDonald’s ω_h, and two alternative conceptualizations of reliability. Though many end users and psychometricians alike may not distinguish among these five coefficients, we demonstrate formally their nonequivalence. Specifically, whereas there are conditions under which α, β, and ω_h are equivalent to each other and to one of the two conceptualizations of reliability considered here, we show that equality with this conceptualization of reliability and between α and ω_h holds only under a highly restrictive set of conditions and that the conditions under which β equals ω_h are only somewhat more general. The nonequivalence of α, β, and ω_h suggests that important information about the psychometric properties of a scale may be missing when scale developers and users only report α as is almost always the casePreparation of this article was supported by the Patricia M Nielsen Research Chair of the Family Institute at Northwestern UniversityWe thank Lewis R. Goldberg, Win Hill, Dan McAdams, Tony Z. Tang and especially Roderick P. McDonald for their comments on earlier drafts of portions of this articleThis revised article was published online in August 2005 with the PDF paginated correctly.     

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Normativity</Emphasis>

Response-dependence theses are usually formulated in terms of a priori true biconditionals of roughly the form ‘something, x, falls under the concept ‘F’ ↔ x would elicit response R from subjects S under conditions C’. Such formulations are vulnerable to conditional fallacy problems; counterexamples threaten whenever the C-conditions’ coming to obtain might alter the object with respect to F. Crispin Wright has suggested that such problems can be avoided by placing the C-conditions in a proviso. This ensures that any changes triggered by the C-conditions’ coming to obtain will be irrelevant to the truth of the biconditional. I argue that this move leaves the equations vulnerable to counterexamples of a slightly different kind: Cases where the change is triggered, not by the C-conditions’ coming to obtain, but by the response. I consider two ways to resist these counterexamples, and argue that both are insufficient. The upshot is a challenge that must be met if provisoed biconditionals are to serve their purpose.